[bee_rider]

Trench warfare thing is a thing, a big thing, about WW1. But it isn’t the only thing that happened in WW1. It looms large in our imaginations, probably because it impacted the geopolitical situation, and that’s what we see through the zoomed out lens of history.

But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean the experience of soldiering.

Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgûl are also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly referencing it.

It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian, and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly influenced by the experience of being on the receiving end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.